Three golds and a bronze in previous Olympics makes you a legend who gets to carry your country’s flag in your sixth and final Olympics.
Kamil’s Last Olympics
family
Final Friday
Tonight was the Girl’s final evening at home. She heads back tomorrow for her second semester of college. (Is it only her second semester? How is that possible? It seems she’s been studying forever, and we’ve only just begun this adventure in independence and eye-watering expenses.)
“What do you want for dinner that final night,” K and I asked her. She thought for a while and replied, “Fettuccine alfredo.”
“With shrimp?” It’s her favorite, and I would have been surprised if she said no, but “No” was indeed her response. “With chicken, I think.”
But how to spend our last evening together? We long ago realized that we are only a small part of our daughter’s circle, and that meant we’d only have a little time with her this evening. “I want to go visit M one last time,” she explained. M, her closest friend from high school, studies at Fordham; they only see each other when they both happen to be home. So a family movie was out, and besides, there’s not much socializing with a movie. Additionally, since the Boy has regional band auditions tomorrow, he would be more than reluctant to spend so much time away from his trombone on the evening before such a significant audition. In the end, we played cards.
Visiting Aunt D
Aunt D is a saint. A generous soul with a kind heart and a desire to throw her arms around her entire family and pull them close for a never-ending hug. My memories of visiting Aunt D stretch back to my childhood, to an age younger than the Boy. We spent alternating Thanksgivings with Aunt D and Papa’s extended family in South Carolina and Nana’s family outside of Nashville. That constituted the majority of our visits.
We haven’t spent a Thanksgiving with Aunt D in probably a decade, but she almost always arranges some kind of family gathering around the holidays. This year, we missed the reunion, and the plan was to have a mini-gathering last Saturday. Alas, Aunt D was sick, and the whole get-together had to be canceled. But the holidays are just not the same without a visit to Aunt D, so we drove through the pine forests on pothole-filled roads (a staple of childhood memories of visiting SC) today for a quick visit — our first since Uncle M’s memorial service this last summer.
2025
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Asheville Visit
Christmas 2025
My Uncle
Memorial
Family
Our family probably doesn’t get together as much as it should.
Game Night
We only have so much time together as a family of four. L will graduate in a few short months, and then her time in our house will be limited to summers. I expect that soon enough, she won’t be staying with us the entire summer. She’ll be twenty, twenty-one years old. She’ll have her own life. She’ll have her own priorities. She’ll have a job that she’ll want to continue working over the summer. Or she’ll have some internship or other. So these evenings are rare.
Some things have, of course, changed, but for poor K, nothing has changed. She always has the absolute worst luck in board games. When we play Monopoly, we call her (and she calls herself) the Slum Lord because she can never manage to get anything other than the very cheapest of properties, and the three of us end up bankrupting her in fairly short order. Tonight’s game of Sorry was no exception. But one other thing stayed the same: we all laughed heartily about it.
Laughing as a family — few things are more precious.
Visiting Aunt D
Aunt D
K and I went for the visitation for my Aunt Y in Rock Hill this evening, stopping by to pick up Aunt D.
“I’ve lost my last sibling,” she said several times.
St. Stephen’s Day 2023
In-Laws’ Visit: Day 6
Sunday
The girls won the bronze bracket.
We went to visit family.
A good Sunday overall.
Stone Mountain Vacation
Georgia Aquarium
The first stop was the Georgia Aquarium, reportedly the biggest in the world with over ten million gallons of water in their various tanks. The kids were fascinated with most of it, but the highlight was the dolphins, both in their display and during the dolphin show. With the way the trainers were hugging and kissing the dolphins between the tricks, it was surprising the kids were begging for a pet dolphin afterward. Instead, they were begging for a stuffed dolphin at the over-priced gift shop.
“We can order one online and it will be cheaper,” K and I explained to no avail. They had already decided: they would split the cost between them and buy the dolphin, sharing it for all eternity.
We all knew where that was headed…
Stone Mountain Day 1
We arrived at Stone Mountain on Tuesday, which would have technically been our first day, but we spent the evening setting up camp and fixing dinner, so I don’t count it as day one here. The first full day at the park was packed: the line park (such as it was — nothing in comparison to the challenge of the line park in Babcia’s region) followed by a train ride, a trip to the top of the mountain (which is the largest deposit of granite in the world, with only 1% visible — the rest of the deposit stretches ten miles into the earth and spreads to five states under the visible ground), and the famed laser show in the evening.
Stone Mountain Day 2
The second full day got off to a slow start due to the late hour we all made it to bed after the laser show. But somehow, I look at the pictures I’d loaded earlier and think, “Wait, these are from when we returned Friday, the final day, day three.” So what of day two? Not sure — such is the nature of a good vacation: it all blurs together in one’s mind.
You Might Have To
I go home to learn about life from my daughter. I learn what goes on in her school, what her teacher says, how her teacher teaches.
L, like any good story teller, doesn’t simply tell us, though, she shows: she begins incorporating various phrases from school into her own speech.
“You might have to” becomes the key phrase. “You might have to do this.” “You might have to move that.” I can imagine L’s teacher helping her with this or that task, explaining, “You might have to try it a different way, like turning it the other direction.” “You might have to wait. I believe someone else is using those crayons.”
“That’s okay” is another. I spill a little milk and mutter “Shoot” under my breath. L consoles me: “That’s okay.”
You Have Five Minutes
It’s amazing the number of confrontations and tantrums we’ve avoided by giving L a time frame. Simply establishing a temporal structure allows us all to avoid frustration. She knows what to expect and, more importantly, when; we know that we’ll have a much more compliant little girl.
It works for almost everything. When L is watching a movie, it’s referenced in terms of the film’s scenes: “When this scene is over, we’ll go for our bath.” The scene finishes; she toddles off to the bathroom when requested to do so. When L is reading a book before bedtime, a reminder that she’ll be going to be in five minutes elicits “Okay”; saying, out of the blue, “Okay, put the book up. It’s time for bed!” is likely to produce nothing but conflict.
It would if some parts of life had more pre-established time frames.
Balance
“Shhh! There’s a monster in there!” says L as we walk toward her room. She’s at that age where she sees monsters, tigers, and bears everywhere. A “smoky, smoky dragon” is a common visitor at night, and right after a bath, an alligator — simply named Alligator — comes looking for her as she hides under her big bath towel. Saturday mornings she likes to jump in our bed (even if it’s made up — she’ll willingly unmake it) and hide under the covers.
“Shhh, shhh, shhh!” she’ll proclaim. “Monster’s coming!”
I play along sometimes, but it creates a problem: she gets genuinely scared sometimes, and it’s because there’s an alligator under her bed or a dragon right over there, in the corner. I reassure here that there’s no such thing is monsters, but it’s difficult to do if I’ve just been playing along with her imagination earlier in the evening.
It’s difficult to balance her developing imagination with her developing fear.
Will she learn there’s no such thing as dragons before she learns Santa doesn’t exist? I’m helping create both illusions, feeling slight pangs of guilt about it, and wondering if it’s all avoidable.
Propriety
Pre-teaching
Kupa is Polish for “poo-poo”, and it’s pronounced, “koo-pa.” Siusiu is Polish for “wee-wee”, and it’s pronounced “shoo-shoo.”
When you’re nearly three years old, everything has a proper method. There is no gray area; there are no acts or activities that don’t have strict rules, regulations, and expectations.
Rituals abound, and often, the adults don’t even realize there is a ritual for this or that, let alone what the various elements of a given ritual are.
L’s morning rituals are set. We wake Her Highness up, and the first stop is the kitchen bar. We get out the milk; she opens it. We bring her the cocoa mix; she opens it. We pour the milk; she adds the cocoa. She stirs and tastes; we stir and taste. She closes the sippy cup; we check that it’s tightly screwed on.
Any violation of these sacrosanct rituals is troubling. Try to open the milk and L cries, “I do it! I do it!” Try to screw on the sippy cup lid before she has a chance and she cries, “I do it! I do it!” It has become so problematic that we introduced a ritual of our own: “L’s Magnificent Mornings.” It’s a sticker-bribery system, basically. It works, but it has only added one more ritual to our ritualistic lives.
Most of the rituals appear without warning. A new ceremony concerns entering the bathtub. It is not to be done at one end or the other, but precisely in the middle. Galaxies collide and gravity dissipates otherwise.
Occasionally, we get to watch a ritual being born. Slowly, it develops and moves from the status of “occasional addition to an existing activity” to full-blown sacrament.
This afternoon, I might have witnessed it.
L came to me asking for help in the bathroom. This can only mean that baby wipes will be necessary. After L created her “awful smell” (as she once referred to it), I suggested that we flush it down.
“No, I need to siusiu,” she replied solemnly.
“Well, we can flush and then you can siusiu,” I suggested.
She shook her head. “No, no! Kupa needs to swim!”
I suggested that kupa might have more room in the big potty and she reluctantly agreed. If I were to place a wager on it, though, I suspect it won’t be the last time L tries to protect kupa‘s right to exercise.